Stumbled across this a few days back: “End big time corruption, PM tells Indians“.
I find it hard to agree. The major problem is ”small time” corruption: the licenses, the permits, the restrictions, the delays, the reality of ”kuch de ke karva lijiye” (pay and get it done).
Big time corruption is a problem even in developed countries and we are certainly not the only ones (See one of my articles on this issue: “Corruption in Public Life – Are we the only ones?“) but it is small-time babu-giri that hinders productivity, de-motivates, creates unnecessary barriers and saps our energy.
January 1st, 2007
Posted by
B Shantanu |
Corruption in India, Politics and Governance in India |
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A few days ago, I came across the BBC new story on why the numbers for AIDS patients in India may be an overestimate: “India ‘overestimates’ HIV/Aids” (Wednesday, 13 December 2006).
The study suggested that “methods used to estimate the number of people infected by HIV/Aids in India” were “flawed and the actual number of cases may be far lower”…The survey of blood samples reported by British journal BMC Medicine suggests the true figure may be 40% of that.
Now, a lot has been written about how an AIDS epidemic could tear apart India’s hopes and dreams of a developed and advanced nation.
So the report not only gave hope to optimists like me but also revealed how the hunger for publicity and sensationalism sometime gets the better of researchers and scientists. E.g. it appears that the “nationwide” figures that had widely been quoted were actually an extrapolation of a study conducted in (just) one district in South India. Not just was the extrapolation done on the basis of a single district’s figures but the district chosen was one of the also “worst-hit by the infection”.
Then, I stumbled across Tosh Sheshabalaya’s report on this subject, “Of AIDS, Indian disasters and Apple IIe mindsets”.
Tosh presents a very different reality – which once again proves how sensationalism often gets the better of accuracy and balance in the chase for headlines.
Some excerpts: Keep Reading…
January 1st, 2007
Posted by
B Shantanu |
Distortions, Misrepresentations about India, Media Related |
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